It is commonly understood that in its focus on rights and
obligations law is centrally concerned with organising
responsibility. In defining how obligations are created, in
contract or property law, say, or imposed, as in tort, public, or
criminal law, law and legal institutions are usually seen as
society's key mode of asserting and defining the content and scope
of responsibilities.
This book takes the converse view: legal institutions are
centrally involved in organising irresponsibility. Particularly
with respect to the production of large-scale harms - including
extensive human rights violations, forms of colonialism, or
environmental or nuclear devastation - and in opposition to
conventional understandings of responsibility in law, morality and
politics, the book provides a detailed analysis of the ways in
which legal institutions - their practices, concepts, and
categories - themselves operate as much to deflect responsibility
for harms suffered as they do to acknowledge them.
Drawing on a series of case studies from local, national, and
global concerns the book analyses how law facilitates dispersals
and disavowals of responsibility, and it shows how it does so in
consistent and patterned ways. In assessing how this 'organised
irresponsibility' operates, and what its consequences are for both
legal analysis and society generally, a thoroughgoing re-evaluation
of law's methods, operation, and consequences is required. At stake
is nothing less than a fundamental re-assessment of the role of
modern law in the production and legitimation of human
suffering.
This innovative and interdisciplinary book provides a sustained
challenge to conventional thinking aboutlaw and legal institutions.
It will be of major interest to those working in law, political and
legal theory, sociology and moral philosophy.
General
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